Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Thursday, 19 January 2017

Staatsoper Hamburg: Otello

17 January 2017

It’s not been a great couple of weeks for Calixto Bieito after the Met in New York pulled the plug on his Forza del Destino. His Otello
has, however, made its transfer the stage of the Staatsoper in Hamburg in one
piece, having been unveiled in in Basel in late 2014. I’m afraid this seemed to
be a similar sort of affair to his Forza,
though, with a handful of Bieitoisms somewhat half-heartedly applied to Verdi’s
final tragic masterpiece.

The main prop—a vast harbour-side crane—will arguably have
had greater resonance for the Hamburg audience than for that in landlocked
Basel, but otherwise neither it nor the rest of Bieito’s ideas seemed terribly
well tailored to Otello (although, I should note, it was all strikingly lit by Michael Bauer).

The chorus
became a kind of semi-imprisoned mob, often stumbling to the front of the
stage, in dirty tracksuits and amplified by a few semi-naked extras, to stare
us down. Otello was a sort of gangster boss, I think, Iago one of his deputies
and Desdemona his moll, understandably miffed at having to appear repeatedly at
the dockside in a series of her fanciest outfits.

Click to enlarge

Otello’s otherness and nobility were nowhere to be seen, so
key threads of the drama—the shocking dissonance between his military prowess
and his social insecurity, the sources of Iago’s envy—were missing. Desdemona’s
whiter-than-white innocence, a pre-requisite for the tragedy, was never even
hinted at, while the director’s now standard recourse to misogynistic violence—though
still often theatrically powerful—left a slightly bitter taste.

And the horror of
Desdemona’s treatment at the hands of her husband is already so powerfully
portrayed in the work that it’s very difficult for a director to try and
underline it without actually undercutting it.

In the first three acts, then, this Otello felt like a bit of a hodge podge, markedly short of the
conviction that was always such a Bieito trademark, regardless of what else one
thought of his decisions (it was unclear whether he’d been on hand to supervise rehearsals).

Yet, as the drama itself achieves its most searing
focus, Act IV was a great deal better. Svetlana Aksenova, a little frayed and
unyielding in the earlier acts, came into her own in Desdemona’s Willow Song
and Ave Maria, delivered with real intensity from a platform half way up the
crane: first she threatened to jump off, and then, broken, sank down in
desperation.

Bieito also had one final trick up his sleeve, as Otello
climbed the structure and was then swung out over the orchestra for his final
moments. This was a coup, but a pay-off arguably not worth the price of having
the whole rest of the drama play out in the thing’s shadow (there was an
audible tut when the curtain rose after the interval to reveal nothing had changed
on stage; ‘gute Abwechslung,’ someone behind me muttered sarcastically).

Here, in his final moments, though, was where Marco Berti’s
Otello was at his best, his acting honest and heartfelt (an unfortunately unconvincing
‘Urgh!’ as he expired notwithstanding). Before that, his performance was
frustrating: loud, unlovely and lumpily phrased. It’s a terrific voice in many
ways, trumpety and ringing, just a shame this performance remained musically
and dramatically so rudimentary.

There was something a great deal more sophisticated from
Claudio Sgura’s liquid-toned and sly Iago, even if the baritone didn’t quite
command the stage as the production clearly wanted him to—and he was, perhaps
unsurprisingly, out-belted by the force-12 Berti in ‘Si, pel ciel’.

Markus
Nykänen made a strong impression as Cassio, but the chorus occasionally sounded
underpowered, and Paolo Carignani’s conducting was often disappointingly
lukewarm—not a great deal of fuoco di anything
coming from the pit. And ultimately there was far too little fire in the belly
of Bieito’s production too: he pulled it back somewhat for the finale, but too
much of the rest just felt rehashed and reheated.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.